Well, some may remember me saying I had a HDD crash before christmas. Well, turned out to be some serious issues - errors reading "unmountable boot device" and "uncorrectable sector errors" basically. Anyway, I tried every fix I could find online to no avail (and yes, I tried everything - 2 months worth of trying) aside from reformatting of course. So, after talking with a few tech support folks it came down to "sorry man, it's a lost cause - your HDD is failing or has failed." Pretty much no way to fix it. Recovery wouldn't be easy without paying for it, even then it wouldn't be 100% I was told. Well, a german trader friend of mine turned me onto Knoppix Live CD - a Free and Open Source Live Linux CD, with a boatload of features. You can also set it up to use off a USB flash drive (1 GB min. required), basically its an OS that runs off a CD/DVD or USB Flash drive instead of off a HDD. So today I decided to give it a go and what do you know, I can now access all my data! 200+ GB of live DVDs, 70GB of live shows & 50GB of mp3s moreless. Not to mention every program I have on my HDD. I can even go online with it if I wanted to. Now all I have to do is install another CDROM so I can use my DVD burner. Fuck I'm a happy soul right now! I'm glad I didn't fall for the "reinstall windows" advice which would have lost all the data. I'd say anyone who has ever expirenced serious data loss should download this CD & have a copy on reserve. Its saving my assets thats for sure. Time for some whiskey. Woo-hoo.